Forty-Eight Hour Burn (15 page)

“Any word on the victim?” Gavin tipped his chin at the burning building as he delved his hands in his thick, fire retardant gloves.

“Female child, age five,” Justin answered. “The mother was in the dressing room when the fire started. The kid was in the play area. Mother looked for the little girl, couldn’t find her, and assumed she came outside.”

“But she’s not out here.” Gavin shot a glance back where the officer came from, at the conservatively dressed Marissa holding onto the weeping middle-aged woman. “That the mother?”

“Yeah, I just managed to get her away from the building. Ben went in after the girl. I couldn’t stop him.”

“Fuck!” The senior deputy officer knew better than to enter a burning building without backup or a self-contained breathing apparatus. Gavin spoke into the mic in his helmet. “Randy, cover me, I’m going in.”

“Right behind you, Lieutenant. Hose is ready to go.” Randy’s assurance came back loud and quick.

Gavin didn’t wait for the water to pave his way inside. He slid the facemask of the SCBA over his mouth and nose. It took a second for his body to adjust to the clean, cool oxygen that filled his nostrils. Knowing he had precious time to waste, he got a steady grip on his flashlight and double-timed into the inferno.

He stepped into the pit of hell. At least, that’s how it looked, the inside darkened by thick smoke broken by an almost blinding beauty of red and yellow flame in strategic areas of the space. Much of the burning seemed to be concentrated in the back of the store. That didn’t bode well for a child believed to be inside a play area Gavin knew to be located in the far corner of the shop.

“What’s it look like in there, Gavin?” Randy’s question broke the crackling silence through Gavin’s headset.

“Dark and smoky.”

“Duh.”

Gavin couldn’t help a small grin at Randy’s retort. “We’ve got flames along the left wall. A few more at the back.” He swept the beam of his flashlight on the scene in front of him, each step timed and measured as he searched for any sign of movement. “I’m no fire investigator but damned if this doesn’t look suspicious, my man. Too much space between hot spots. Too many places of origin.”

“Arson?” Randy sounded intrigued.

Gavin didn’t answer. Instead, he shouted hello. He stopped, listened, shouted again. Nothing. He shouldn’t do it, knew he would be breaking a serious regulation, but he feared his bellows weren’t being heard muffled as they were by his facemask. He took a deep breath of the fresh oxygen and lifted his shield.

“Is anyone in here? Ben?” He started to call out for the little girl before he realized he failed to get her name. Shit! “Princess?” It was a shot in the dark, but considering he was surrounded by mostly dark, he figured it might work. What little girl didn’t get called a princess now and then?

Coughing followed by a quiet sobbing reached him just before he spotted the figure stumbling through the smoke, hunkered over a bundle in its arms.

“Christ, you freakin’ cops and your heroics,” Gavin muttered good-naturedly as he removed his facemask and slapped it over first the child’s tiny face and then Ben’s. “Aren’t you supposed to be in your car eating donuts while we trample through the burning buildings?”

“Krispy Kreme is closed on Sunday,” Ben managed around a fit of coughs. “Wouldn’t need to be in here if you guys didn’t take so long to respond.”

“Give me the girl.” Gavin tried to take the child from the other man, but the officer held tight.

“I’ve got her. Or rather, she’s got me. She isn’t going anywhere. Get us out of here.”

“Stay low,” Gavin instructed, nearly doubling over from a coughing fit. The smoke grew thicker. He needed the oxygen, but the girl needed it more. “Damnit, hold this on her face, and walk with me.”

He kept beside the officer rather than taking point to lead the other man out. One wrong step, a split second of disorientation could send the officer walking the wrong path through the smoke.

“Almost there. Straight ahead. Randy, we’re coming out,” Gavin said into his mic. “Have the EMT kit ready. Is there an ambulance on scene?”

“Roger that, Lieutenant,” Randy answered. “Ready for me to come in with the hose?”

“Not until we’re out. We’re going to have to attack this head on. Start from the entrance and work our way in.”

Gavin had the door within his sights. Some five feet ahead he spotted a ray of sunlight cutting through the dense, gray fog. He guided the officer and girl toward it, letting them take the lead now. Too late, he spotted the spark of a secondary fire igniting to the left of that doorway. Something in the vicinity made a whoosh, and he saw Ben dive out of the building just as flames swallowed the doorway.

* * * *

Man trapped
.

Georgia’s blood turned to ice in her veins each time those two words echoed through her memory. As the daughter of a firefighter, she long ago learned not to panic each time the alarm tones sounded. She knew better than to fear the worst or dwell on what could be happening at a fire scene. But when she heard words like that, when she knew that man could only be
her
man, panic and the most bone-chilling fear one could imagine consumed her very soul.

Instinct made her want to run to the scene. Sanity told her she would only get in the way. So she sat on pins and needles for hours on end, first listening to the radio chatter as Randy, Darrell, and firefighters from a neighboring station worked feverishly to rescue Gavin. Then, she paced by the phone believing surely Randy would remember she still had a department scanner, that she knew what happened, that he would think to call her.

He did. Hours after the incident, just when she had been about to throw caution and sanity to the wind and start calling around herself, the phone rang. Gavin sustained a few minor burns to his cheek and ear, took in a lot of smoke, but was otherwise okay.

Okay. Gavin is okay
.

“That’s good,” she muttered aloud, trying hard to reassure herself even as her double-handed grip on the coffee cup she held tightened. “Because you sure as hell aren’t okay.”

She wanted so desperately to ask Randy and Gavin to come straight over. Surely Gavin would go home after leaving the hospital rather than finishing out his shift. She wanted to insist he come straight to her instead. She didn’t. The only way she felt warranted to make such a demand would be if she gave herself to him, to
them
as they wanted. Then, and only then, she could issue a few commands as well as obeying those dished out to her.

She hadn’t slept a wink, a part of her waiting for Gavin, though she knew the weight to be futile. Dawn peeked through the curtains over the living room window, delivering the start to another day. Forty-eight hours, she thought wryly. Gavin wanted to give her forty-eight hours of pleasure and contemplation. She had about all of the latter that she could take.

“You’ll never be okay until you take what you want. Ugh, why do men have to be so pigheaded?” She seethed as she set her cup on the end table and stood. No more pacing, no more waiting, no more deliberation. “Damn it, I’m tired of this.”

Fury rising, she stomped up the stairs, shedding her robe as she burst through her bedroom doorway. She yanked on a pair of her rattiest sweats over the practical white panties she wore, pulled one of her father’s old fire department T-shirts over her head, and pounded back down the stairs.

Life proved long ago to be full of sacrifices. In the last forty-eight hours, Gavin and Randy taught her a lesson even more valuable than she thought they realized. They taught her about the most fierce, most soul-consuming, most heart-wrenching burn a human could experience. They taught her about true love, and no way in hell would she let that fire die out without a fight.

* * * *

Where in blazes did the damned woman get off to
?

Gavin spun on his heel and stomped to his truck, throwing open the driver door and slamming it again with enough force to rattle the hinges.

“She’s not here.” Randy made it more statement than question. Still, Gavin answered.

“No, she’s not fucking here.” He peeled out of the drive, his mind spinning as rapidly as the wheels on the pavement as he sped down the street. “Where would she go at this time of the morning? It’s a freaking Sunday! She didn’t tell you anything about going somewhere when you talked to her last night?”

Randy shook his head. “Not a word. All she wanted to hear about was you. She was scared to death, man. Worried you were hurt worse than you were. I can only imagine what that was like for her listening to the play-by-play of that call over the department radio yesterday, knowing you were trapped in that burning building.”

Yeah, Gavin could imagine it, too. The play-by-play he heard through his own headset had been no picnic. An unforeseen, secondary burn had ignited at the front of the store. It shouldn’t have happened. He didn’t know how the hell it did happen. He only knew the instant he saw the flames suppress the daylight, he was well and truly fucked.

Skill, determination, and a whole lot of prayer saved his ass yesterday. The skill belonged solely to Randy and the other firefighters who battled the flames to save him from being cooked. He claimed credit for the determination and attributed the prayer to Georgia.
 
As he hunkered down in the dense smoke, fighting to breathe shallow, to make the oxygen in his tank last as long as possible, he thought only of Georgia. Even being surrounded by the mother of all elements, his body stirred with the need to have Georgia, to be with her, to give her everything she wanted, including that blasted job.

“You should have taken the chief up on his offer to bring someone else in to finish out the shift,” Randy said, not for the first time since they left the hospital around one in the morning. “You should have gone to her then.”

Gavin shot the other man a cool look but didn’t respond. He needed time to think, to figure out how to satisfy his needs, as well as those belonging to the woman he loved.

“I suppose you still think I’m overreacting about the daycare, too.”

Randy pushed out an audible breath. “No, I’m thinking you hammered the nail on the head with that one, my friend. That fire yesterday afternoon, the way Marissa’s shop went up like that, that couldn’t have been an accident. Someone rigged that place, and the connection to the club seems a little too obvious for my comfort.”

It did for Gavin’s, too. He didn’t know who committed the arson on the shop or how they managed to set it to burn in timed increments in broad daylight, but he would damned well find out. Until he did, Georgia would be lucky to get out of his sight for a second. Just as soon as he found her.

“I’m going to turn her over my knee and blister her beautiful ass for going missing like this,” Gavin muttered. “Where would she go? I don’t even know where to look!”

“Your place,” Randy suggested. “Mine? Naw, I’m betting yours. She’s familiar with it, and you’re the one she wants right now. My guess is she needs to know you’re safe. Our woman is as soft as she is tough, Gavin.”

“Don’t I know it?” Gavin nearly groaned at the thought of Georgia’s pouting pussy lips, her plump breasts, her angelic face, her hands, her freaking toes, all satiny soft and nowhere to be found. “You’ve talked about selling your place, moving into mine for a while now.”

“We get things straight with Georgia, and I’ll put it on the market tomorrow.” Randy didn’t hesitate.

Gavin knew the other man loved Georgia as much as he did, would go out of his mind if he couldn’t live under the same roof with her once they officially made her all the way theirs.

“Think she’s going to squabble about selling her father’s place?” Randy asked.

“I’ve got some ideas about that I’ll run by you and her later.” He’d been thinking it over, tossing around options that never occurred to him until all those long hours sitting in the hospital last night. “I may have come up with a solution that we can all live with.”

Randy sighed. “I would sure love to hear it.”

Gavin turned onto his street, glancing through the trees in the direction of his driveway, still a good distance away. He caught a flash of something blue, recognized it immediately as being Georgia’s compact Saturn, and punched the gas. His dick stiffened, his pulse hammering a cadence of intense relief. “You will, just as soon as we teach our love a lesson about making us worry.”

* * * *

Gavin’s truck barreled into the drive as if the hounds of hell were on his tires. Georgia sat up straighter, her gaze colliding with his through the windshield as he brought the truck to a screeching stop and cut the engine. For a moment, he simply sat there, glaring at her. She dared to glance away, her attention landing on Randy in the passenger seat. He, too, stared back at her, his usually friendly and compassionate expression none too happy.

She slowly got to her feet. Her heart hammered in her chest so fiercely she wondered it didn’t burst clean through her breasts. She looked back at Gavin as he got out of the truck, her gaze taking in every inch of him from his booted feet to his cowboy hat.

All in one piece, she thought with a sense of gratefulness that made her sway on her feet. He was alive and seemingly unharmed but for the angry place on his cheek and the bandage that concealed another on his left earlobe. Thank you, sweet baby Jesus.